Santina Amato

Mary Rubi

Photograph

From ‘Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough,’ an ongoing film and photographic series.

The series explores the intimate relationship between women and their bodies through the symbolic use of bread dough. In this project, Amato captures women posed with an amount of dough that matches their body weight, using the dough as a metaphor for the emotional and physical burdens women carry.

About the artist

Santina Amato

Santina Amato was born in Melbourne, Australia, to Italian immigrants, and has lived and worked in the USA since 2010. She works in a wide range of mediums and formats, from sculpture to live performances, and explores the experience of the intimate body. In her work, desire and erotica are translated into a broader consideration of the physical, psychological, and social functions of the female body, through domestic materials such as bread dough and used bed sheets. She considers and incorporates domestic labor when handling these materials that become signifiers for a personal and intimate space.

Santina received an MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and was a 2022 AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum of Art in New York. She is a recipient of the 2023 New York State Council on the Arts’ Individual Artist Grant, and plans to create new portraits in her ongoing series Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough. She is currently a 2023 mentor for the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Program.

Santina’s work has been exhibited and screened at Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, PA, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL, MOCA Tucson, AZ, Here Arts Center, NYC, Governors Island Art Fair, NYC, and the Kuntshalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, MI. She has received funding from city and state agencies in New York and Illinois, and the Australian Council for the Arts among others. Her work has been included in publications such as Chicago Artist Writers, Emergency Index, Psychology Tomorrow Magazine, CreateMagazine, and Lenscratch.